Our mission
Reel South Cinema is a nonprofit film arts organization expanding access to independent, repertory, genre, regional, and community-based cinema across North Alabama.
Our work grows from years of film programming, festivals, screenings, and community events, and from a belief that audiences in the South deserve a wider range of films on their screens.
That means bringing independent and repertory cinema to local audiences, supporting Southern stories and storytellers, and continuing our longstanding commitment to women, femme, queer, nonbinary, and other voices that have too often been left at the margins of film exhibition.
Our Mission
Reel South Cinema expands access to bold, independent, repertory, and genre film across North Alabama.
Through screenings, festivals, education, publications, and community events, we champion underrepresented voices while building a more connected, inclusive regional film culture.
Why access matters
Across the South, there are communities where going to the movies means much more than choosing a showtime. In rural areas and smaller cities, theaters may be limited, hours away, or gone altogether.
When a community loses access to cinema, it loses more than a screen. It loses a gathering place and a point of entry into a larger cultural conversation.
That matters especially for young people. We encounter moving images constantly, but access to a broad film culture, and opportunities to watch, discuss, question, and understand what we see, still matters. Film can be entertainment, but it can also be a way of learning how stories are constructed, whose stories get told, and how images shape the way we understand the world.
Part of Reel South Cinema’s long-term work is making that access easier to find here.
Southern stories
Our region has its own filmmakers, histories, communities, landscapes, traditions, and ways of telling stories. We want Southern filmmakers to have opportunities to show their work here, and Southern audiences to have opportunities to see stories that recognize the places they know.
At a moment when so much film production and storytelling is happening throughout the South, there is still a gap between where films are made, whose stories they tell, and who gets meaningful access to see them.
Our work
Reel South Cinema builds on established film programming and events in North Alabama, including Hauntsville Film Fest and a range of curated screenings, collaborations, and special programs.
At the center of that history is a commitment to femme and queer voices in film.
Hauntsville Film Fest showcases genre films written, directed, or produced by women, femme-presenting, and nonbinary filmmakers.
The festival grew from a desire to make more room for filmmakers who have historically been underrepresented in genre cinema.
That philosophy carries into Reel South Cinema more broadly. We want women, femme, queer, nonbinary, Southern, regional, and independent filmmakers to be part of the everyday film culture audiences encounter here.
Our programming brings independent, repertory, genre, and culturally significant films to North Alabama through screenings, festivals, curated programs, collaborations, and community events.
We are interested in both discovery and rediscovery. We want to put new work in front of audiences who may not otherwise have access to it, while giving older films another life on a screen and in a room together.
What we’re building
For years, we have been developing the groundwork for a small, flexible microcinema in North Alabama: researching exhibition models, equipment, seating, licensing, operations, accessibility, programming, and the realities of sustaining an independent cinema. That work has included learning from other microcinemas and repertory spaces, studying what makes them viable, and thinking carefully about what kind of space would actually serve this community.
At the same time, Reel South Cinema has been taking shape as the nonprofit home for that work. Becoming a nonprofit was a deliberate process. It has required planning, saving, research, and a significant amount of behind-the-scenes work before there was ever anything public to announce.
We are working toward a permanent microcinema that can also function as a third space for local film culture: a place for independent, repertory, genre, and regional cinema, but also for filmmaker conversations, workshops, publications, meetings, small events, and the kind of informal connection that happens when people have somewhere to gather regularly.
The microcinema is one part of a larger vision for Reel South Cinema: expanding access to films that may never reach a traditional multiplex, creating more opportunities for Southern filmmakers and audiences to meet one another, and building a year-round home for the film culture that has already been growing here.
Our plans also include expanded screenings and curated programs, filmmaker discussions, educational opportunities, publications, and deeper partnerships with artists, venues, and community organizations throughout the region.
See y’all at the movies!